She paused, then said hesitant: “Possibly, after all, you may see for yourself. I told about your saving me and your offer to help us, and The White One was very much interested. By what you have done you have earned and proved the right to be trusted, and when I tell all--who knows? At any rate, I was going to ask you to walk there with me.” “I am ready,” said Drexel springing up. “In those clothes?” Drexel for the first moment since waking thought of what he wore, and of him who waited for the garments. “What shall I do?” he cried. And he told her of leaving the peasant at the station twelve hours before. “Believe me,” she returned, “he is patiently sitting there, his left leg over his right leg, his wrong-side-out cap on his left knee. Ivan will take the clothes to him. The outfit Ivan bought for you is on the table. I will wait for you in the next room.” Half an hour later, Drexel, in a cheap, ready-made suit and overcoat, and with a forged passport describing him as a mechanic, walked out of the court with Sonya. He was now truly entering upon the underground life; he was one of those who were being hunted down craftily, ruthlessly by Prince Berloff’s vast secret army; his life might any moment be snuffed out. Yet he felt an intense exhilaration; he felt that he and Sonya would defeat the prince, despite all his cunning, despite his myriads of spies. A furious wind was raging in from the Gulf of Finland, armed with an icy snow that stabbed the face like tiny daggers. As they bent away against it, her arm through his, he asked her what had occurred when the countess had been returned to Berloff’s house the night before, but she had not seen the countess. They spoke of Captain Nadson, against whom in particular they must ever be on the watch; and Sonya told him of the captain’s own company of gendarmes, known as “Nadson’s Hundred,” who had been recruited for the most merciless work from the lowest and fiercest types of men. As they came out upon the Palace Bridge they paused, despite the gale, and gazed to where, a few hundred yards up the Neva, stood the mighty fortress-prison of Saints Peter and Paul. They could not see it with their eyes, but they sensed its fear-compelling form: a huge, low, irregular oblong of massive granite walls, moat-surrounded, washed on one side by the Neva’s flood, with cannon scowling blackly forth. This grim pile was the prison that held Borodin, perhaps in some dungeon beneath the water’s level. And it was this grim pile, separated from the Czar’s palace by only the river’s width, in the centre of Russia’s troop-filled capital--it was this that they two, a man and a woman, with a few others proposed to rob of its chief prisoner. “That is a symbol of all Russia,” she murmured with subdued passion. “Russia is just one great jail; at best the position of the people is merely that of prisoners on parole. The Czar is not a ruler. He is merely head-jailer.”